Lying was Alan's default state of being. Every time he'd been home from college, he'd had to make up a raft of lies to float on. “What's your major?” “English,” he'd say, despite not settling on it for years. “What's your career path?”, his grandmother would say, a smile on her face, as his grandfather passed ears of corn around the table at their backyard Thanksgiving. He'd have a heart attack a few years later, and she… well, Alan was hoping she'd grow senile before she realized just how much bullshit Alan had been feeding her. “I'm going into editing,” he'd say, before the perked eyebrows of his family would turn to him. “You know, movies, books, comics, plays, they all come to publishers unfinished.” The sentence hurt to say. He wanted what he wrote to show up on the front step of a publishing house, and for them to be so blown away that they couldn't deny him – fuck investing in an editor, they needed to invest in Kleenex to dry their tears at his masterpieces – and increasingly, that fantasy was the only hope he managed to hold on to.
His family, inevitably, would grow more interested at that. It sounded more plausible than writing scripts for movies, for comics, for manga, whatever that was. After all, being creatively successful was unrealistic. The kind of profession of a grifter who'd never amount to anything. But someone who edited their work, and made something of themselves by wedding their knowledge to that spark? That was realistic enough to be plausible.
“So, what publishers are you looking at?”